Gainesville luckily incurred only limited damage from Hurricane Irma, which passed through town 10 – 11 September, with several harrowing hours of late-night howling winds over 60 miles/hr (100 km/hr), and depositing a four-day total of 12 inches (300 mm) of rain (25% of the normal annual total). No serious injuries occurred and minimal damage to structures – except for that caused by falling trees. Several hundred large trees were toppled, some of them hundreds of years old. Our house was fine (just a bunch of tree limbs in the yard), and, importantly, McCarty Hall is fine! The trees knocked down power lines throughout town and about half the town was without electricity for two days, and by the fourth day almost everyone has power again. Our local quiet stream, Hogtown Creek, set record flows and briefly flooded one of the main intersections in town at University Avenue and 34th Street. My three-minute video below includes a few mournful pictures of the blown-over trees and also some short videos of the high water in Hogtown Creek. Also, the video has theme music that I composed on GarageBand.
